Creef:
Elena Creef’s piece discusses the visual politics of photographically capturing the Japanese-American population in the wake of Pear Harbor: a Japanese naval strike which nominally justified widespread racism, namely, the U.S.’s evacuation of people of Japanese ancestry out of their homes in the Pacific region, and into internment camps.

Kozol:
Kozol’s article challenges the authenticity of a government –piloted, photographic archive of Japanese-Americans throughout the 1940s evacuation process, given the nation’s interest in illustrating this population as obedient, loyal and non-threatening in an effort to feel secure on the home-front.

Howard:
Howard offers a panoramic display of the unique disruptions in traditional gender and sexuality roles that internment camp life presented to Japanese Americans.

I was taken aback by a specific section in the Relocating Citizenship article, where Kozol addresses the FBI’s campaign to destroy the artifacts of Japanese- Americans directly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In referring to the countless Japanese family heirlooms that were seized by government officials, Kozol speculates that “the objects’ ‘realness,’ the materiality of the artifacts made them threatening,” which couldn’t be a more brazen testament to America’s inherently xenophobic nature. This unveils the “difference equals deficit” model that this nation has unabashedly relied on for centuries in their countless campaigns to preserve a pristine American identity that never really existed. Our abstract/undefined understanding of what it means to be an American, may commonly be mistaken as open-ended to an outsider looking for a way in.  However, in truth, the prototypical American: the White- Euroethnic, middle-class male, who we use as our standard of acceptance, will always decide who belongs in this nation, who is defined as the underclass. No matter the history that your family may have here in America.
This reminds me of our contemporary immigration policies that subject hopeful-American citizens to arbitrary Citizenship Tests that I likely would not pass. Regardless of the fact that I am a descendant of slaves that gave their lives building this nation, my failing grade would likely categorize me as un-American.